Racing in Middle Earth

The 21st World Mountain Running Trophy

Chris Doyle of England raced down the last steep slope of the rocky mountain, sprinted to the finish line, slowed to a jog across the soft sand of a curving beach, and slipped for a cooling dip into the gently lapping waters of the Pacific Ocean. He could have paused to relish the massed crowds cheering every runner, or for a gourmet espresso from the coffee bar alongside the finish line, or to check on Lord of the Rings locations, or to admire the fully rigged racing yachts skimming calmly across the bay where he took his swim. Wellington, New Zealand, in other words, offers a variety of pleasures that are not common for competitors at the World Mountain Running Trophy.

Mountain running is notoriously a remote and lonely sport, often tending to the bleak in its venues. Wellington made it mainstream and metropolitan. In most years, the annual IAAF-endorsed world championship is contested up, or (in alternating years) up and down, some obscure peak in the European Alps or Celtic Britain—and once it was in Alaska. It seems to flourish primarily in off-season ski resorts. Wellington put it into the heart of a sophisticated capital city, where there happens to be a more than adequate mountain among the office blocks, restaurants, and residential streets.

“Where I live country is town, town country,” wrote Wellington poet Lauris Edmond, whose house perched a few yards from the runners’ steep climb. “The course was just a stroll from our team’s hotel,” was how Simon Gutierrez, the top finisher of the TEVA U.S. Mountain Running Team, put it, after placing 10th on a tortuous, precipitous, technically challenging circuit. Where l live country is town, town country. Walking beneath a green filigree of ngaio, sticky-berry, birch, I see quite close the angles of office block towers and roofs; the same clear light encompasses both.

The green 650-foot high, mile-long Mount Victoria in downtown Wellington is a piece of mid-19th century environmental planning genius that was cunningly adapted to this 21st century sport. An extra attraction for many of the 28 national teams who contested four races there (men and women, senior and junior) was knowing that on their first steep climb through dark pine trees, they were in the dangerous gnarly forest where the Hobbits cowered from the Dark Riders in The Fellowship of the Ring. Director Peter Jackson, like Mountain Running Trophy event director Arthur Klap, is a Wellington boy whose imagination thrives on the secret corners of his local terrain. Runners in training around Wellington still sometimes find relics of Middle Earth battles or journeys. But the land there is an adventure in itself for runners, in a harbor city so vigorously full of steep hills and wind-swept movement that it makes San Francisco look like a placid Dutch landscape. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb—look at the sea, frantic with masts and sails, the land galloping down to it, gorse flowers flying, wind in its mane of flax; and then, there it is, crags with their feet in the water getting breath for the next round.

The biggest bonus of the urban venue was the crowds. “We’ve never had so many spectators in the 21 years of the event,” enthused World Mountain Running Association President Danny Hughes. “The public turned good races into an unforgettable day of sport,” said Klap, who staked the whole event on the public’s willingness to come out on a spring Sunday and support it. His gamble paid off. New Zealanders do not miss a chance to watch the world’s best on their own doorstep, especially with local heroes rising to the acclaim. “They were inspiring—they all gave me splits on how big my lead was,” said Jonathan Wyatt, the Wellington-born uphill specialist who pulsated to his fifth world title. “The crowds were amazing the whole way round. They definitely urged me on,” said Kate McIlroy, the Wellington-born mountain-running novice who flattened the world’s elite in the women’s race.

As for Kate McIlroy, as soon as she passed the summit for the second time in the last race of the day, people poured in their hundreds down the hillside to give her a champion’s welcome that matched the finish-line bleachers at Boston or New York.

Watch out, world. At 24, suddenly strong, mature and confident, this almost un-known young woman, who emerged to win her first New Zealand cross country title in July, took the world’s toughest and canniest female mountain runners by the throat, shook them, and left them. She broke clear with the first uphill stride of the race, and just kept going away—surging up, flying down, never easing on the twisting turns among the trees or the rough rocky patches on the ridge. She won by two minutes. As a measure of what that means on a 9.1K course, third-place Anna Pichrtova of the Czech Republic had been only 15 seconds behind the fully fit Moon in their long duel up Mount Washington, NH, in June, a much longer race. And Pichrtova is a respected Olympic and World Championship marathoner, while McIlroy has barely raced outside Wellington. McIlroy has her sights now on the Commonwealth Games 5,000m and the World Cross Country Championships, both next March. Watch for the name. Tall, powerful, poised and flowing, McIlroy looks for all the world like the young Allison Roe.

Her story is almost too good to be true, a global triumph achieved in her first international race on the same rugged hill where she began running 15 years ago, as a member of the children’s section of the Wellington Harriers club, whose modest wooden headquarters sits on Mount Victoria. One senior club member mused amidst the celebrations, “I wonder if she would like to be reminded of her first club run, when she was nine and got lost, and we found her crying in the bushes, right there on today’s course?” Another recalled how she has always been generous with her time and talent, helping to guide and support new runners, a good club-mate. That matters in New Zealand.

Jonathan Wyatt’s win was less surprising but equally dominating. He has won the title four times before, but always in uphill years. Americans know him from his phenomenal 2004 record up Mount Washington, as well as some staircase wins up the Empire State Building and others. He is now the first to win the World Mountain Trophy five times, and the only runner versatile enough to have won both up and up-and-down. He took the lead, like McIlroy, on the very first uphill stride. “I knew the field was strong, so was surprised to have a lead of 15 seconds on the first climb. After that, it was a matter of consolidating, using my uphill strength and making sure I didn’t make a mistake like fall over on the downhills,” he said. He won by 2:10. But he was generously quick to dedicate his run to Italy’s Marco De Gasperi, who usually has Wyatt’s measure on up-and-down courses but was inexplicably and, most think, unjustly left home by the national selectors.

Did Wyatt’s win inspire McIlroy, whose race came an hour later? “It was a huge lift to see him win like that. We were watching on the giant screen near the finish, and I turned to my boyfriend and said, ‘I’d like to do it exactly like that.’ I can hardly believe that I did—it’s pretty special. I’ve run many years on Mount Victoria but not this course. In this kind of running you just never find a rhythm.

”The program started with an open “fun run” at 7:30 a.m., then a children’s race. After such a full day (especially working every minute of it as Katherine Switzer and I did as public address announcers), you recall a selection of vivid impressions more than a coherent narrative. Here are three that sum up the spirit of a great day for running.

Another favorite of the crowds was Vedat Gunen of Turkey, who powerfully won the junior men’s 9.1K race by 32 seconds and led the Turkish junior team to an unexpected victory. Outsiders will see no reason for New Zealanders to give such special support to Turkey, but this goes much deeper than sport or tourism. It is a bond that began back on the blood-soaked hillsides of Gallipoli in 1915, where New Zealanders and Turks slaughtered each other by the thousand and have lamented it ever since. The first thing the Turkish team did in Wellington was visit the memorial to the conflict. It overlooks Cook Strait, on steep rocky ground very like Gallipoli, and is inscribed with equal tributes to both sides. The highest point the invading allies reached in the Gallipoli campaign was when the Wellington Regiment, suffering terrible losses, briefly took a bare brown peak called Chunuk Bair. That Turkish name is now part of Wellington’s identity. New Zealanders do not like to get openly emotional about such things, but when Wellington crowds cheered Turkish runners to victory up a steep stony hillside, there was something more going on than just running.

The Italians were irrepressible. My New York training friend Gregory Vitiello is an ardent expert on all things Italian, especially their wine, their food, their art, and their marathon runners. But even he did not know that Italy had won every senior men’s team championship in the 20-year history of the World Mountain Running Trophy. “The Kenyans of Mountain Running,” I called them at the awards ceremony. By unremitting individual commitment and potent team packing (second, third, fourth, eighth), they extended the streak in Wellington to 21, and the Italian women made it a double, heading off the inspired Scots for their 10th win in the series. Mountain running, founded in 1985 as a world championship sport, is unusual in that women play a fully equal part in its history.

But the moment everyone will treasure from the Italians came at the awards ceremony. In the only glitch of the championships, the concert center staff put on the wrong tune as the Italian national anthem for the women’s awards. After five seconds, the hall was full of cries of “Noah, noah, noah!” and soon, encouraged by Switzer as MC of that part of the ceremony, all the Italians present burst into an operatic rendering of the true anthem that would have made Pavorotti proud. They even went poppa-poppa-poppa for the bits played by the brass and percussion. They encored for the men’s medal presentation. Some day, the United States or New Zealand or Turkey might beat the Italians for the trophy, but no one could beat them at singing the national anthem.

No one could watch the children’s races without feeling more confident of the future. They started their circuit (1 or 2K, according to age) in wave after wave, all racing with such pure delight along the waterfront and turning with such zestful effort up the first steep hill that the affluent world’s obesity problem seemed to fall away before our eyes. Some fell over at the first corner, some staggered to a walk on the way up the hill, and some lost their parents in the crowd and came sobbing to the announcers after the race—but they did their part in creating a day of sport that lifted the spirits in many ways.

Mountain running is one of the oldest and most elemental of all sports. A king of Scotland staged a mountain race in 1068 to choose a good messenger, and the Irish hero Finn McCool tried to choose a wife the same way. John Bunyan’s Christian sets out to run up the Hill of Difficulty in “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” though its steepness reduces him to “clambering upon his hands and knees.” A poem by Rudyard Kipling pays tribute to the mail carriers of India, who run up the high Himalayan foothills, “to the peak from the vale,” defying altitude and tigers to get the letters through. If there is a runnable mountain anywhere, it is likely someone will have run up it.

Opening the awards ceremony, I alluded to the formal oratory of the Maori, with their convention of always beginning a speech by paying tribute to the ancestors and the land of the host people. Mountain running has its ancestors, far back in time, and more recent ones, like the conquering Italians. It is a sport visibly building its history. And there is no better way of paying tribute to the land anywhere, especially if it’s challenging, than by running over it. World championship mountain runners do that in a special way—and do it supremely well—but every runner does it, everywhere in the world, every day.

"The clouds are constantly changing position and the hill falling away so fast it seems to move too with an urgent clambering gait, shifting and sifting, one grain on another in a perpetual unwillingness to settle for what the world is at one moment of its turning . . . " Quotations are from poems in Scenes From a Small City by Lauris Edmond (Wellington poet, 1924–2000).

Roger Robinson lives in Wellington and New York. In the 1970s, he several times won the annual seven-mile “Vosseler” cross country race on a Mount Victoria course only slightly less severe than the mountain running one.